Many shoppers use the Internet to do product research as part of their shopping process. Since shoppers typically do not know where to start looking on the Internet for a specific product, they use Internet search engines to help them locate products or product categories. These search engines have become incredibly efficient at finding and categorizing billions of web pages. The search engines go out and “crawl” or “spider” the web. When a search engine finds a new web page, it categorizes it so that it can be matched to the words that are used when someone engages the search engine.
Since each search engine categorizes hundreds of millions or even billions of web pages, these search engines use algorithms to determine the relevancy of those web pages. Prior to the present invention, however, there has been no way for a search to be conducted in which the ranking is based on stores with physical locations where products and services can actually be purchased and physical proximity of such stores to the shopper. Consequently, while the Internet can provide an abundance of information about a product or product category, it is not presently set up to sort through the multitude of what it considers relevant sites and extract those that relate to a store with a physical location that actually carries and sells the product where the shopper can inspect and purchase the product. And, it cannot tell a shopper where the nearest such store is located. It also will not be able to give the shopper his or her local shopping options if multiple stores within his or her local area have the product in inventory.
Many shoppers are interested in doing product research on the web, but they would prefer to buy the product locally because they need it immediately, want to inspect the product in person, do not want to pay shipping fees or want to support local establishments.
Merchants with a physical store can get an Internet web site and list their products on the site, but the Internet search engines do not effectively help a shopper find those physical stores that sell the desired product or service since, when the search engine does a search, it looks for key word matches and is not designed to connect the shopper to a physical store (that has the product in inventory) that is geographically near the shopper. Thus, merchants with a physical store are not yet well served by creating and maintaining a web site.
Search engines are good at searching what is on the web, but they lack the ability to take product inventory and location data that is not on the web and make it searchable so that shoppers can find and purchase products and services that are available to them locally.